A year and a half or so ago, I stumbled across the then-named "Star Wars Conversion" on Hard Light's forums, and found they were looking for a modeler. Having not touched a 3D modeling app in years, I decided to try my hand. My first project was the Imperial Star Destroyer, a daunting task.

Now after 3 restarts and thousands of hours of work put in, I have finally completed this model. I almost want to apologize for the wait, but at the same time, I look over the mesh and think to myself, it was worth it. All that's left to do is fix a couple smoothing errors and then UV and texture it! I myself can't wait to see it when it's done.

This thing's a poly monster for sure. The basic hull itself has about 3000 triangles, with another 16000 in the details. "My god, how will that run in game?" you ask me. Detail boxes are the answer. Luckily for us the FreeSpace Open engine has a very intuitive feature called Detail boxes, which is a sort of Level-of-Detail system but used for specific parts of a mesh, rather than the whole thing. Each set of greebles in this model is enclosed within one of these boxes, meaning that your computer won't be chugging along trying to render the whole model, it'll only be rendering certain parts at certain times, dropping the effective polycount significantly.